Back for another disaster

Well, this is different.  I wonder what the world is preparing me for.  Every crisis is more frightening than the one before it, every test to my resilience more strenuous.  What is next?  Never mind.  I’ll wait.

I’m writing now because I was looking for a poem that I needed and went back through “Poems for Wednesday” posts to find it.  I needed the poem because my spirit couldn’t breathe, and a poem is like an inhaler.  I can’t say ventilator now.  That word is not for joking or metaphor.   I re-read my old posts, and thought, “That’s good and I should do more.”  I hate saying it: I’m a writer and I want to be a writer.

I’m writing because on Wednesday evening I was doing one of the things I do best and have done best my whole life, which is charming the daylights out of men over 70 (it used to be over 60, but now 60 is too close to my own age).  The gentleman in question was interviewing me for a job at an organization that I believe to be nearly a cult, and that others have described to me as a cult — “a tawdry cult” in one case.  During the interview, he himself said, “My wife asks me if [organization] is a cult because there is so much jargon and it changes all the time.”  So even in this time of great duress, I’m not going to work there.  Anyway, this senior acolyte asked a typical job interview question, “what is your career like in 10 years,” and my ungoverned mind said “writing” and my governed mouth said something more respectable.   And if I want to be writing in 10 years I need to write now.

My beloved, my Will (Daniel’s gone, but not gone enough.  He lurks malevolently), says I should write a novel of the coronavirus.  Not an original idea.  But I can capture the texture of a crisis, of me in yet another crisis.

Just when I have learned, or am starting to be open to the possibility of learning, to slow down, to believe there is enough for everyone, I am faced with grocery ordering: there is not enough for everyone.  I have to act RIGHT NOW.  I am TOO LATE.  Dear God not again!  Not that fear again of too late.  Too late for a brilliant career.  Too late to save Milo from his father’s influences (WordPress wanted me to say “influenzas,” suggesting some machine learning happening in the background.  My beloved knows about machine learning.  I try to be a learning machine.). I thought I was too late for great love, and I was wrong.   I thought I had a great love early in my life, and I was wrong.   So late, not too late, has possibilities, has pleasures.  Penelope Fitzgerald didn’t publish her first book till she was 50.  I am also behind schedule on that, having neither a publisher nor a manuscript, with 50 less than 6 months away.

It’s never too late for a crisis?  Never too late for a poem.

The new story; the now story

3:29

I did not write an intentions blog post last year.  I remember exactly why.  I wrote down my intentions elsewhere, in my Ink & Volt exercises (and yes, last January I invoked Brad Feld and said, “I wish I could do what the cool VC guys do.”  I repeat myself.  It’s fine.  If I say it twice, I must mean it.)

I met my goals and lived up to my intentions beautifully last year, ahead of schedule. I looked back at my posts from January 2018 and they made me very sad.  I was crushing myself.  I was not at all a friend to myself.  I did some extraordinary and brave things and told myself I was stupid and heartless to do them.  No. I was right the first time.  Once I got some momentum going, living in truth was unstoppable, and I have lived in truth as best I could for 2018.  I look back at least year’s Ink & Volt lists, and the blog posts, and recall the conversations with friends and see how small and scared I was then.  I wonder if I will look back a year from now and see the same thing, next year when I am that safe giant.

Or maybe this will be a year for consolidation, for cementing all of that behavior change when it will get really challenging.  Maybe this will be the year that I say that it’s okay for me to have all the good stuff.  Because even as I’m typing and thinking about the move and how great it’s going to be and the rugs I want to buy, I have that old fear, that something bad is going to happen.  That it’s not going to be really great after all.  That it can’t really be great for me.

Here is the antidote: I note, record, and revel in how this has been truly the best year of my life.  This year, when I walked into many of nightmares and continued walking.  (Did I write that already? I think I did.  I must really mean it.)  This year I learned that I could do that, walk into the nightmare.  I learned that even a nightmare truth is better than pretty lies.  The solidity of knowing the worst is better than the wobble-board of fearing the worst.  And there were so many people holding my hand as I walked into and through the nightmare.  I never thought that would be the case, but they showed up.  This might have been the hardest year of my life, but I don’t think so– I’ll have better perspective later.  When I put aside the fear, I had more room for happiness and joy.  When I detached from a grading system that would always fail me, I felt more successful.  I made things possible that seemed impossible just weeks before.

So… Even if my new apartment is less congenial and commodious than I hope; even if my neighbors are loud; and the water pressure in the shower remains unworthy of the name; and the cable cord is strung along the ceiling rather than the floor and it vexes me every single day and I have to stay home and pay money to get it changed; even if I run through my savings and have to borrow more from my parents; even if I buy all the wrong rugs and lamps; even if my stuff won’t fit in my new apartment and I have to rent a storage space for my Pesach dishes and college memorabilia and suitcases.  Even if lose my job.  Even if friends break my heart by leaving me because I have left Daniel.  Even if I never find the love I hope for.  Even if all those things at once, the last year is indelible.  It happened.  I am the me that did that.  I am also the me that undermined herself for decades, see, consolidation, above.  But a strong counterstory is emerging.  “Is emerging” as if it were a gas or natural phenomenon.  No. I AM CREATING a strong counterstory.  I am living a strong counterstory.

My main intention in 2019 is Abundance.  I have elsewhere told myself it’s abundance, not excess, but I’m going to excise the negative from my intention. I know the difference between abundance and excess.  One makes me happy and the other makes me anxious, so I don’t have to wag my finger at myself and warn myself away from too much (I’ve overspent this past week, and I’m struggling a lot with that.)

4:04, with breaks

 

Safety

8:00, maybe?

I use the Ink and Volt planner for work.  My friend recommended it, and I wish I felt as comfortable as he does using a professional blogs for a range of musings.  Brad Feld does that, too.   I think if you are a successful venture capitalist, you have a lot of latitude.

Each December the Ink & Volt guru sends out four worksheets, one per week, that people can use to prepare for the coming year.  I don’t pay enough attention to week 1 (looking back on successes), although I should because this was among the best years of my life.  I don’t particularly like week 2, which asks you to think about relationships and imagine the movie of your life and your legacy.  That’s probably a sign I should think harder about it.  I am just finishing several days of week 3, culminating in the theme for the year.

My theme is abundance.  As I was thinking about abundance, I associated it with expansiveness (not surprising), but also about safety.  This year I want to be safe, and I haven’t felt safe in years and years and years.  I might not even know what it really means or feels like, and I suspect I will cry for days when I find out.  But I don’t want to play it safe.  And I’m trying to work out in my head how being safe and playing it safe are opposites.  If I’m truly safe, if there’s a true place or feeling of safety and security and deep okay-ness, then I can be pretty far out there.  I can take bigger risks because not everything is riding on that outcome. I feel I’m explaining the obvious to myself.

My career is not what I would have hoped or predicted.  I look back at my 30s and most of my 40s and I see aching underperformance compared to what I know I can do now.  I was playing it safe, I was playing scared (how can those two mean the same thing?).  I would like to say that it was because I didn’t feel truly safe in my life.  Was that me, or my circumstances?  Both.  I think I have rarely felt completely safe, and a lot of my anxiety and choices derive from that.  I haven’t felt like I deserved safety and certainly didn’t feel like I could turn to others and ask them to help me feel safer.

This goes back a long long long way, to my childhood.  There was some economic anxiety when I was in elementary school through middle school and into high school (wow, that’s kind of a long time).  My parents were lovely and kind and every material need was provided for, and there were piano lessons and gymnastics lessons and plenty of good stuff, even during the anxious times.  But… but… there was a gap, a slippage, maybe, where safety should have been.  Maybe I felt safe, but only just, or it was only temporary, or I was always aware that safe was taking a whole lot of work.  Yes, that’s it.  I was safe, but safe was taking a lot of work and unsafe was always right over my shoulder so I had to work harder and harder and harder.  There was no room for slippage, no ability to let down my guard.  There was no slack.  Never ever any slack.  This is not at all what my parents thought they were giving me, but it’s what they gave me.  Poor loves.  The feeling didn’t come from them per se, or it wasn’t personal between them and me.  It was how they themselves felt, moving through the world.  No slack was how life was, or how they thought it was.  So passing on that feeling was just part of socializing me, like table manners (my table manners are not robust, my feeling of precariousness is quite robust).

There was a feeling of near scarcity.  We had enough, now, but we might not have enough later.  The opposite of abundance.

So I came into adulthood this way, and carried it along, and probably misread situations and thought there was no slack when there really was.  And then got into situations in which there actually wasn’t a lot of slack when there should have been a whole lot, and in which I was absolutely not safe or cared for.  And that’s just on the professional side.  Or maybe I misread safety as boredom because I didn’t know how to create, because I couldn’t answer the question, “What do you want to do?”  And home was not safe for me, even as I devoted my considerable (even abundant) energy to making it wondrously safe for Milo and safe for Daniel, who didn’t want the kind of safety I offered because, I suspect, it made him feel vulnerable.  I’ll never know.  Life is just twisted up and sad that way.

So, I just want to be safe, and gigantic, and abundant and expansive.  A very safe giant.  A safe, cozy, risk-taking giant.  At first thinking about being safe, and not knowing what it might feel like, made me cry.  Then I got on this giant wave and I’m feeling better.  I like the idea of being that giant.  It makes everything seem funny and possible.  I can put it on  a t-shirt.  Or find a doll-sized giant (that would be a miniature giant, and aren’t words super fun that way?) on Etsy and make it my mascot.  What, exactly, would a giant doll– not a gigantic doll, but a giant in doll form–look like?  Someone on Etsy has thought this through.  (A quick search for “giant doll” reveals that the collective Etsy needs to do more thinking.)

If I can make it play, I can do it.  I always thought unsafe was adjacent, but maybe super-safe is even closer now because it’s inside of me.  Now.

8:35

Uncomfortable

6:53

My therapist called me out on not being truthful to Daniel, by refusing to share my good news (which I did, 24 hours later), and by declining to speak up when he said something that definitely merited further discussion.  We discovered that I feel I have to chose between honesty and safety.  It makes me sad to type that.  In another time, I might have chosen honesty.  But I don’t feel safe.  Even small eruptions or uglinesses or slights or eye rolls undo me.  There’s no protective coating, no cushion of happiness anymore.

Today, when there was very little pressing at work (for the second or third day in a row), I felt exhausted, uncomfortable, all over the place.  I walked a lot in the city, noticing as I did that I felt awful, to and from an eye doctor appointment, which prevented me from reading, which I so wanted to do — it’s my favorite way to disappear.  I wondered if this is the tax of being in my marriage or of being dishonest, or just the aftermath, the hangover from the period of work insecurity.  That period was very long and I was very brave and relentless and vulnerable and honest.  It is like me to feel terrible once it’s over — once I’m safe in that way.  Safe and not safe.  Poor lovey, no wonder I’m worn.

Daniel knows something is up.  I am slow to say I love you, so he says “I love you [pause i which I don’t respond].  Don’t you love me?”  Yes, I do, and I know — per safety — that this reluctance will be thrown in my face like hot oil later.  Such violent metaphors.  I feel violence has been done to me, and my experience tells me that it will never be acknowledged as such — and the rejection itself will feel like violence.

I feel like I am moving without meaning from point to point, to the weekend, to sleep, to the next televised baseball game, to the next workout, to the next meal, as if these are markers on the way to a destination rather than the substance of life itself.  (That said, there are exceptions, there are periods of deep happiness and contentment at work and home.  Daniel’s desperation for my forgetfulness and absolution, and rubber-ball resilience, and a goldfish’s sense of personal history is high now, though, and that’s coloring things.)  I am desperate to be going somewhere, and that feeling is exceptionally strong at home.  At home I am a shark, in constant motion, looking for the next thing to do.  Not doing is not pleasant, although, to be fair, I consciously slowed down today while waiting for my eyes to resume their normal dilation.  I rested for 30 minutes, then did gentle yoga, not accomplishment yoga, then went for ice cream (well, groceries & ice cream)– before I walked the dog, which is a radical act of putting myself first.

And here’s Daniel in my head, telling me that I don’t slow down for anyone else, that it’s always me first.

I am so wounded by him.  And yet, when he’s nice, it’s nice.  He clearly wants me to join him in this happy meadow, forgetting the scorched landscape behind us.  Why, he would ask, do I want to keep going back to the scorched landscape when we could stay in this lovely meadow?  Why am I reaching for the blowtorch?  Oh, dear Daniel.  I’m reaching for it to keep it away from you.  And we need to get really clear about the source of the scorch, and you think it was me as much as you.  That’s not true.  I was about to write, “I wish I could give in, surrender, and go along with the niceness.” I am not sure that is true.  If it were true, I might do it, I might surrender.  But it doesn’t feel safe.  My domestic life is not okay, and I have to act as if it is okay.  Or, I chose to act as if it’s okay while I sort all this out and get really honest with myself, at least, in a place of relative safety.  Daniel knows it’s not right, but choses for his own reasons to go along.  He suffers, though.  I am sorry about that.

Why, with Daniel, is there a huge reservoir of poison, anger, rage, meanness, but not of love?  Why doesn’t that get drawn on?  Because he doesn’t have it for himself, and all the putting himself first in the world doesn’t fill it up.  Poor Daniel. I mean that sincerely.  It must be no fun at all to be him.

What would make my life at home feel real?  What would feel like love to me?

7:19

Telling

9:17

Or not.

My grant will come in.  The grant that will see me through the end of the year (if another grant comes in on top of it).  The grant that came about because I went to a funder/friend and said, “Let’s talk about 4 options: 1) a giant grant; 2) a big grant; 3) $150K to see me through a rough patch; 4) a different job. And I need a decision by June.”  This was a “just because we love you and your work and it’s an emergency” grant.  This was a “you are important to us grant.”

I got an inkling last week that it would come through, the $150K version.  And today I got the call confirming it, and the spirit of “we wanted to help you” was so evident.  My funder/friend didn’t even know how much of my time I could give him from this grant.  He will assuredly take more than I told him I could give — he’s like that and his employer is like that, and that’s all okay right now.

And I didn’t tell Daniel last week that it looked good.  And I didn’t tell Daniel tonight that it came through, and the spirit in which it came through.  And that is telling.  I don’t want to celebrate with him. I don’t yet want him to know this.  Or maybe I want him to ask, to keep it in his mind, all my deadlines and balls in the air, and know that to inquire.  But mainly I don’t want him to be happy in my direction me about this.  Not yet.  I want a separate happiness for a little while.  His happiness for me, and relief for himself, would be overwhelming.  I would have to accede to the idea that everything is fine now.  Everything is fine.  Let’s go back to the way it was.  Or his idea of how it was, rather than my actual memories of what was, which I keep wanting to talk about and he keeps wanting to dismiss and to bury under a torrent of rage and nasty words about me and how I never let go, never forget.

(We just had a heated disagreement about a MeToo situation).

I don’t want to go back to how it was, not the reality of how it was, not the how it was since 2005.  The how it was in 1995? “Yes, she said, isn’t it pretty to think so.” But no.

9:59, with a long interruption.

Temporary

9:16

And the next morning, it was all gone.  I heard Daniel talking in his sleep.  He has lovely, sexy morning dreams from what I can tell.  He’s not to blame that when he says “I love you,” in a tender way in his dream that he’s not talking to me.  But it made me so sad.  I’m not in the category of his mind or his love anymore.  Nor, perhaps, is he to me.  We are radically disrespecting what we once had.  This is why Van Morrison will forever make me cry.

I’ll write more and better tomorrow.  Now this is just record keeping.  I’ve decided to behave differently professionally.  A friend, who is president of a significant organization and acts like it, inspired me.  My way of showing up won’t look like hers, but it will look different than what I do now.  And, now that survival at work looks solid, I’m going to leap toward… abundance!  Growth!  I decided in January to set the bar at survival.  Now I’m resetting.  Survival

(restarting at 9″45)  Anyway, survival isn’t enough, it’s not fun, and if I’m still in survival mode in 12 months, that looks like failure. So, there.  I said it.  I intend it.  I intend growth mode.  Lots more to write tomorrow about this, and about my supportive friend, and about my no regrets position, and how the smart people do all kinds of risk mitigation.  I am all in with myself, for myself.  That doesn’t necessarily mean having blinders on about work.  I am all in, and persuadable if something else — more ambitious, more secure, more fulfilling — comes along.  I am all in on my own behalf, and on behalf of the theme of my work, but not necessarily my institution.  And that’s as it should be.

I made myself literally sick with anxiety Friday worrying that Daniel would not come on a 4 day work trip with me, that he would invite another woman into our home while I was away.  He is resisting, and that makes me sad, even as I have scheduled a meeting with a lawyer.  F. Scott Fitzgerald quote about the sign of a truly brilliant mind is to have two entirely opposing ideas at once.  Yes, that’s me now.  It might as well be nice until it’s over.

Salve

7:46

Such a nice word, no?

A juicy yoga class, just enough to keep good tension and let bad tension go.  A funding reprieve (maybe — if it goes through) till the end of the year, which is what I wanted when the year started.  (Intentions are powerful things.)  A beautiful spring day.  Watching the baseball game from bed, with dinner on a tray beside me, and a new coconut cream dessert (from the co-op spending spree).  No obligations for the night ahead, or at least none that I’m going to attend to.  Daniel not home yet, so nothing to fake or fear or even, mildly, to interfere with my small pleasures.  I can live like this for a while.

About the funding.  If it comes in… I might feel relief.  I might feel relief for the first time in six months.  Or not.  It will be interesting to see.  Small glimmers of a fantasy: if Daniel has economic security, and I have economic security, could we find our way back to being happy?  Nope.  I mean… no.  Too many lies.  Too many questions: the urban outfitters tag, the Neiman’s bills that keep showing up.  The years of me thinking about divorce without taking myself seriously about it.  Pity, because I love him.  But not enough for repeated self-immolation.

So what, exactly, is that deus ex machina? I should send Daniel a link to this blog!  That would do it.

I will do the right thing at the right time.  Now is the right time to watch the game and feel good, even for just a little bit.

7:58

Quiet

8:46

One would think my life was normal — of course, this is normal right now, this entirely unsettled, unknown, one day at a time because that’s as far as I can see, kind of living.  But I meant the other kind of normal.

Daniel and I are getting along because he’s being nice and we aren’t talking about anything serious.  It’s easy now, if not deep.  I have to keep reminding myself of the things underneath, until I decide I don’t want to remind myself, that I want to be quiet and still, instead, and enjoy being nice and watching a movie I didn’t particularly want to watch (Call Me By Your Name — lovely, but made me sad and lonely and dreary feeling), buying Daniel a chocolate bar, which he won’t ever eat, because he ran out of his favorites.  It’s nice this way.  I can see why I was so angry and wrecked when it disappeared.

And a small but invaluable breakthrough at work — not external but internal. I can negotiate for a better exit than I originally foresaw.  I know what I mean by that.  I can make a case for staying on at no pay, but also no rent charged, until I find my next job.  I’ll need the order, the structure, the fast wifi and kitchen and reason to get up and get dressed in the morning.  And I’m going to ask for it.  And if the first response is refusal, I’ll say, “Why can’t you?  The space is not in demand.  This is better for all concerned.  I think you can do this.”  That turned things right around.  It makes the possible– even likely — end of my work more bearable.  I”m not losing everything at once, just a paycheck.  It turns out the other stuff matters quite a lot, too.  And it also matters that I am recognizing myself as the kind of person who can ask for this, and who can expect to get it.  That, I think, will be what gets me through to the next place.

And maybe that notion of smaller stepping stones, of breaking things down into only the immediate necessary pieces explains why I am blank on the divorce front.  It’s not necessary to decide that right now.  It’s one thing at a time, and right now, that thing is minimizing — ideally to zero — the lag between paychecks.  Actually, right now that thing is tomorrow, and getting across town tomorrow in time for my therapy appointment, and then that thing is figuring out packing for a tiny bit complex double-header business trip while my assistant is away.

I’ve stopped insisting that someone else or something else has to move and help, and I am simply acting as if that will in fact be the case, and I’ll recognize it when it comes.  Ironically, what enabled me to do that was finding my agency in terms of my exit at work.  I can, in fact, do something. I can get a little running room.  At the end of the rope, there’s a little more rope, most times.

And that also might explain why I am entirely unmotivated to finish a speech I have to give in 10 days: it’s not the next thing, yet.  Just one thing.  Just a little more rope.

9:01

Perception

9:11

I thought I had something to say… I think I feel better, physically, when I write, also when I exercise a lot.  I’ve had a stomach ache for days. I kept trying to tell myself it was purely physical, purely about the dietary whiplash of Passover, or too much chewing gum with  artificial sweetener, or harsh unfiltered water (which actually does hurt my stomach — I’m unusually sensitive to water).  But once I considered that it might be emotional, that my body might be having the very hard time that my mind refuses to acknowledge, then I felt better.

Sometimes pain just wants to be noticed and acknowledged, a delivery signed for, even if you don’t open the package just yet.  I suppose.

I am so fearful of feeling worse.  I am so fearful of the devastation I’m trying not to recognize.  My therapist (now a 3 day a week part of my life because if not now, really, when?) suggests that the devastation might not be so bad.  What has gotten into her these days?  Per my previous post, we are considering whether I’ve actually been quietly and unacknowledgedly (where’s the adverbial form when you need it?), devastated for years, and am just now… now that it’s fucking undeniable on these important and long-fragile fronts (I had typed most important, but most important is my relationship with Milo and with my body… so many parentheticals.  I’m baaack.).  Anyway, devastated for years and just now have the external wreckage to match the long-standing internal wreckage.  And am finding it’s both worse and not as bad as I thought.  Worse, in that my stomach hurts all the time, or did.  Worse in that… what if there is not another job that’s good, and not another life that is good.  Not as bad in that I can conceive that it’s not my fault, entirely, that sometimes things happen and all the good-behavior-as-incantation-and-magic-spell doesn’t ward it off.  Not as bad in that there is still breath and yoga and laughter and sleep and friends now more than ever.  Not as bad in that I see how strong I am, so I can also be weak.  Not even sure what I mean by that last part but it makes sense, even though it sounds like something you’d find on an inspirational pinterest board.

I had something else to say… not sure where it went.  I’ll come back tomorrow for it.  Good to write again, even badly.

9:25

Onward

8:43

Ceaselessly, ceaselessly, ceaselessly onward, for the good thing that will come after this unbearable period that I am bearing so well.  I want to eject myself from the journey.  Time will do what time does, but only minute by minute.  Minutia by minutia.

My mood shifts rapidly.  I feel that most of my life is an obstacle course, things to be endured and overcome.  Nothing for joy.  Then, I find my spirits lifting because… why not?  Because a woman who ran a yoga studio that I went to, almost daily, 5 years ago, saw me today and recognized me immediately, despite my grey hair and sunglasses.  A friend says my institution might not be the best place for my work, and lists a dozen other places that I could look at.  No guarantees — they could all turn me away just as easily as everyone else has.  But the possibility of possibility is heartening.  Yes, the possibility of possibility.  Capped with a safe ride on the bike highway.  It was only six blocks, but it felt like a good distance, traveled well.

And then another turn.  I fear Pesach.  I fear so much time with Daniel, so much inertia in our house.  I’m not working, so I can rest, but I can’t rest with him because, as I’ve written before, it feels like lying.  I can’t help it that I have to wait, but I want to wait as actively as possible.  This, though, is frenzy.  And obstacle course thinking, where there is no joy.  Frenzy makes it much much worse because I forget what’s interesting.

Enough.  A book, another story, one that races to a conclusion, as I wish mine would.

8:55